Ectar doesn't like me D:

[thenikus]

Ectar-senpai says he's ashamed he ever made me commander.

Does anyone know what exactly Ectar and Vakir's assessment of the player's progress is based on?

[Akhyleus]

Surely Victory/Losses rate, the number of planets saved. I had no issues with Ectar in Legendary even when using exterminatus.

[Nandus]

Does he react negatively on klled brothers?

[thenikus]

Man, I've only had 2 defeats in 40 hrs of playtime and never yet lost a marine :(

[Vathek1]

Originally posted by thenikus:

Man, I've only had 2 defeats in 40 hrs of playtime and never yet lost a marine :(

By 2 defeats, you mean you have failed two missions? That's probably what has Ectar so pissed at you. Now, if you were running the Baleful Edict like a gene-seed processing factory (i.e. getting Knights killed on every mission to store that sweet, sweet gene-seed to respec high-level advanced classes) I don't think he'd like that either, but it probably wouldn't be quite as bad.

Also, I'm curious as to what missions you failed? With the exception of the Craftworld mission, Sacrista, and Morbus Gate missions, it's impossible to fail a mission other than on a complete squad wipe, which I don't think has happened to you as it's pretty hard to pull off except on one particular boss fight.

[thenikus]

It's pretty easy getting defeated when the Bloom keeps spawning enemies, mutating them, etc., all on High difficulty missions :/

[Vathek1]

Originally posted by thenikus:

It's pretty easy getting defeated when the Bloom keeps spawning enemies, mutating them, etc., all on High difficulty missions :/

Ah, that makes sense. What sort of team compositions are you using? On Bloomspawn missions, make sure to take at least one Knight with good AoE attacks (Purgator with multiple grenades, etc.) A couple thing that could help you avoid squad wipes are:

• Don't let your Knights get separated
  
• Don't use Overwatch when a Knight is in full cover; he will swing out to aim, thus exposing his entire body and negating the benefit of cover.
  
• Know which enemies to cripple or eliminate first. Early on, crippling enemies (e.g. by shooting or hacking off their main weapons with Astral Aim/Hammerhand) is usually your best bet. Later on, stuns + executions will be your bread and butter.
  
• Don't worry yourself too much about the bloom meter rising. If you haven't yet triggered a pod and are at close to 100%, just hold position and activate aegis.

I haven't had a complete squad wipe on Ruthless, but to be fair, this was my third campaign. Once you understand the mechanics, the combat in this game isn't particularly difficult or complex, but until you know those mechanics, you'll have a hard time.

[Nandus]

On standard it was a tradegdy to me even having a night wounded. Critical wounds I had only three in the whole campaing, just because of one special bossfight. On ruthless I take a little more damage...but I could imagine legendary could be more challanging. As Vathek1 stated, knowing the machnics is 99% of the success

[C.T. Grey]

He likes you, but he's like that daddy who always frowns at your business. And even when you do good, he can only compare to you to others, and never appreciate your achievements. Until the final, when he hints and suggests that you'd never stop, even if he tried.

The Inquisitor however doesn't never ever trust, even though you pull her bottom out of fire more than once. And whenever you go to see her, she's always complaining about you being there.

The grandmaster makes a big change, when he gets trapped outside the zone and nobody for the story terms can break in. He's a very different character to what you'll see at the beginning.

[Vaatihastur]

Originally posted by thenikus:

Ectar-senpai says he's ashamed he ever made me commander.

Does anyone know what exactly Ectar and Vakir's assessment of the player's progress is based on?

He only started complaining the first time I lost a gate mission.

[Vathek1]

Originally posted by Nandus:

On standard it was a tradegdy to me even having a night wounded. Critical wounds I had only three in the whole campaing, just because of one special bossfight. On ruthless I take a little more damage...but I could imagine legendary could be more challanging. As Vathek1 stated, knowing the machnics is 99% of the success

I'm planning to try a Legendary run again. I gave it an attempt once, and whilst it wasn't difficult, it wasn't particularly fun since it stretches out the boring and tedious early game quite a bit longer (research and construction times are doubled by default).

If you can make it through the early game slog, then Legendary will turn out pretty similar to Ruthless, as the enemies don't behave any differently on higher difficulties; they just become more bullet-spongy which is a very lazy way of increasing difficulty. It didn't feel to me like their damage output was higher at all between Standard and Ruthless; if you were taking more damage it possibly was because you were taking longer to kill things.

An inverse difficulty curve is normal for these types of games, but this one isn't a curve as much as a steep drop off a cliff. The late-game enemies (Plague Marines and friends) are ironically less dangerous than the things you face early on when you lack the tools to reliably deal with swarms of cultists.

I'm not saying that the developers necessarily need to buff the late-game enemies, because I really don't want to deal with 100 HP bugged Hellbrutes that can shoot through walls with no LoS--that isn't fun. But they need to figure out how to make the early game less tedious, whilst keeping the later game challenging. I know this sort of balancing isn't easy to do... and this is why making modding tools available would be a great thing. Let the community figure out how to adjust things to taste, and everyone is happy. The vanilla game is quite fun once you get past the early game tedium, and creative mods will give this game a lot of replayability and longevity.